Fresh off of his memoir Roll The Calls hitting The New York Times best seller list, WME executive chairman and TKO CEO Ari Emanuel is returning to his podcast.
Emanuel and co-host Ben Persky will bring back their Rushmore podcast Oct. 20, seeing the pair team up with high-profile guests to debate the greatest people, events, and teams of all time.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will be the guest on the season two premiere, debating the Mount Rushmore of NFL comebacks. Future episodes will include appearances from Pat McAfee (who is also a producer on the show), Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin Durant, Larry David, and Jerry Seinfeld. Season two is presented in partnership with nativ.ly and produced by Pantheon Media Group, filmed primarily in WME’s Beverly Hills headquarters. Episodes will be available on YouTube and other podcast platforms.
“Everyone has their own Rushmore, and everyone thinks theirs is right,” said Emanuel. “Season Two turns up the volume with bigger debates, bigger personalities and even more people willing to tell us why we’re wrong.”
“The debate is what gets us started, but the fun is in the stories and history that paint the conversation,” added Persky. “When you dig into what makes people the greatest, with the foremost experts of those fields, you get world-class perspective about the things we all obsess over.”
Rushmore debuted last year, with guests that included Tom Brady, Elon Musk, Peyton Manning, Jeff Koons and Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others.
“Ben and I have been on multiple vacations together, and we get into these conversations about the Mount Rushmore of all different topics,” Emanuel told THR last year of the show’s origins. “Finally, after a little bit, I said to him, we need to talk to an expert and get his point of view, because he thought my point of view was horrible and I thought his point of view was horrible.”
Emanuel added, “It was just a conversation, and we picked subject matters that we were interested in at the time and that we thought we had really great people that were experts to engage with, and they did, and that’s what we wanted to do, and then it just kept on snowballing.”